In Super Bowl City, Scars Remain Where the Water Receded

Track athletes practice in the breezeway between portable classrooms on the site where George Washington Carver High School once stood. The basketball team practices outdoors, if it’s warm enough.

William Widmer for The New York Times

By JERÉ LONGMAN

January 30, 2013

NEW ORLEANS — Back in town for the Super Bowl, Marshall Faulk paid a visit Tuesday to his alma mater, George Washington Carver High School. It was a place both familiar and foreign, a rearranged tableau that he found encouraging and discouraging and, for a second, a bit disorienting.

He is the school’s greatest athlete, a Hall of Fame running back, a man who made his living with an acute inner gyroscope. But Faulk needed a moment to recall the exact location of the football field before the playing surface and the school and this area of the Ninth Ward were devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

“Here,” he said in the parking lot, getting his bearings, realizing that he was standing in the place where two decades earlier he had run for so many yards and played so many positions that he often left the field only at halftime and after the final whistle.

Seven and a half years after the storm, the original Carver High has been razed in an isolated, battered neighborhood that will probably draw few visitors during Super Bowl week except those gawking on disaster tours. Carver’s students still attend class in temporary buildings. Bungalows, Faulk calls them graciously. Trailers is the term used by the principal. The basketball team has no gym. Until the Rams secured a court at a nearby elementary school, they began this season practicing outdoors.

When the football team reached the state playoffs in November, someone donated a single generator-powered light to provide meager illumination during late-afternoon workouts. It was only enough to avoid being smothered by a blanket of darkness, but Carver persevered and advanced to the quarterfinals.

A plaque honoring Faulk’s 2011 induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame will go on prominent display at Carver when a new school is built. For now, it remains hidden away, secured in a crate.

“These trailers are not very safe,” said Isaac Pollack, Carver’s first-year principal. “The way security is on the weekends, it’s not worth the risk.”

Marshall Faulk in front of a New Orleans gym where he played basketball as a boy. His high school was razed after Hurricane Katrina, ravaged like so many houses and families in the city’s Ninth Ward.

William Widmer for The New York Times

A new $52 million Carver High is planned, but bids recently came in significantly over budget and were rejected by school district officials. Plans are being redrawn. Meanwhile, officials still hope to break ground soon on a separate project, using $1.4 million in donations to build a football and track stadium that would feature artificial turf, lighting and up to 2,000 seats. The field would be made available to other schools and would allow the track team to quit training along campus breezeways and on the potholed Louisa Street that runs in front of Carver.

“It’s a matter of cutting through red tape and hanging on,” said Brian Bordainick, a former athletic director at Carver who has marshaled the stadium project since 2008. “I hope this creates a new normal for a generation of kids who grow up thinking, ‘This is my community; this is what I expect to play on.’ ”

Yet aspiration and reality have not always coincided in the recovery from Katrina. The halting pace left Faulk with self-described feelings of ambivalence upon his return to Carver. “When I go back, I still get a little upset at having it be like that,” said Faulk, who will turn 40 next month and is an analyst for the NFL Network. “Those memories, playing here. You can’t get those back. Does that anger me? Yes. It gets the emotions going.”

But he also reminded himself that if Carver is not yet rebuilt, at least it remains open. Many schools in the area are closed. Even before Katrina, Faulk noted, it was challenging to convince kids in the impoverished neighborhood to come to school and stay in school and believe that an education would get them anywhere. The parents and alumni who fought to keep Carver open, he said, understood that busing students to other parts of the city would only add another layer of risk and discouragement.

“It creates more of an epidemic that we’re trying to get rid of in our country,” Faulk said. Through the years, he has assisted his alma mater with donations for uniforms, playoff travel expenses and renovations to the stadium in City Park, where Carver plays its home games. He is also helping to rebuild a park where he played youth football. Faulk’s presence on campus, where he once worked early mornings in the boiler room and took cold showers to wash off the grit before classes began, brings confirmation of “what can be accomplished with hard work and perseverance,” said Walter Harris, the current athletic director at Carver.

An Altered Landscape

Everything has changed in the neighborhood since Katrina. It is not the home Faulk knew. Even before the storm, the place where he grew up as the youngest of six boys, the notorious Desire Housing Project, was torn down. It was a place so threatening that, during Faulk’s freshman season at San Diego State in 1991, his high school coach, Wayne Reese, told The New York Times: “I was worried he and the other kids would get a stray bullet. We tell them, ‘Go home, stay there, don’t come out.’ For one hour, after practice, they would each call me and check in. We never wanted darkness to catch them.”

Mixed income housing, known as The Estates, now stands in the Desire neighborhood, colorful duplexes that at least “look much better,” Faulk said as he drove through the area. But it has long been a troubled location. All 425 units in The Estates had water and other storm damage from Hurricane Isaac last August, and residents have complained of shoddy construction and chronic problems with leaks from rainfall, according to reports by thelensnola.org, an independent, nonprofit news site.

Marshall Faulk, who once sold popcorn in the Superdome, played there for the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI.

Dave Martin / Associated Press

“It’s just the anger,” Faulk said. “People are upset. They want assistance. They want help.”

Just across the Industrial Canal from Carver and the Desire neighborhood, the inundated Lower Ninth Ward became Katrina’s indelible symbol of failed levees and breached recovery. But 15 other neighborhoods “were equally poor and heavily flooded,” said Allison Plyer, the director and chief demographer of the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. “The Desire area is very similar.”

The area surrounding Carver is a jarring incongruity of rejuvenation and abandonment. The high school had about 1,300 students before Katrina and now has 375. A playground is refurbished here, a cluster of homes resettled there. But many houses remain empty, punch-drunk with gaping holes. Just behind the school, three deserted cottages in Easter egg colors still bear search-and-rescue hieroglyphics, the familiar, spray-painted markings written as if in a mortal checkbook. Some have taken to calling the markings Katrina swastikas.

The gym at Press Park where Faulk played youth basketball is vacant, discarded, tagged with graffiti, a dumping ground for tires and discarded auto parts. “Could be a dead body in there,” Faulk said. “I ain’t lying.”

He pointed out the water mark above the windows on a wrecked home, but there was no locating the house near Carver where Faulk had lived with a friend in his later high school years. “I could have shown you but it’s gone,” Faulk said, his hand sweeping in a gesture of rising, pummeling water.

The Savemore Supermarket near Carver is barren, its interior as open as a doll’s house. Many in the area lack transportation and must walk a long distance, or take a taxi, to buy groceries, said Shanda Gentry, the principal at nearby Mays Preparatory School, which is scheduled to close because of poor test scores. The route of the elementary school’s Mardi Gras parade next week was altered, Gentry said, because “we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

When Katrina struck early on Aug. 29, 2005, Faulk was in Detroit with the St. Louis Rams, preparing for a preseason game. He remembers nothing about the game, only the television tuned to CNN for days, the despair that his hometown seemed like a third-world country and the dread of not knowing for 48 hours or so that his mother and a brother had safely evacuated to Houston.

Coach Darian Chestnut with a student. George Washington Carver High School had 1,300 students before Katrina; it now has 375.

He could not help feeling a twinge of resentment toward what seemed a more urgent government response to Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast. He understands that failures from Katrina led to a greater understanding about disaster response, “but it doesn’t make it any better.” The recovery from Sandy will continue to be used as a measuring stick in New Orleans, Faulk said. “If that surpasses what’s gone on here,” he said, “they’re going to have some issues.”

He wrestles with this conundrum: Do ‘they’ care and if ‘they’ do, who are ‘they?’ At the same time, Faulk became a great athlete in part because he sidestepped doubt, always believing that the next touchdown, the next game, would bring a winning result. He is convinced that hosting the Super Bowl is good for New Orleans, validating the sense that it is recovering and remains a major league city.

Faulk is hopeful that economic recovery in the French Quarter and the Central Business District will someday spread like the water once did, reaching broken, invisible places like the Carver High area and the Lower Ninth Ward. But he also acknowledges that his life in San Diego is comfortable and distant from his childhood struggles. Those who are still here must live daily with frustrations from Katrina while he does not.

It is one thing for him to say that recovery needs more time and patience. He also understands that it can be difficult sharing someone else’s vision of forbearance when you are still waiting to rebuild or living with limited access to health care and fresh food.

“You feel sorry for the people that’s living in it because to them, encouraged, discouraged, it doesn’t matter,” Faulk said. “They just want something done. They want a return to normalcy. They want their lives back.”

Waiting for the Recovery

On the St. Claude Avenue Bridge, Faulk drove over the Industrial Canal into the Lower Ninth Ward. This neighborhood, too, bears the jolting contradiction of renewal and desertion.

Marshall Faulk, right, was a star athlete at George Washington Carver High School.

Eliot Kamenitz / The Times-Picayune, via Landov

In 2000, just over 14,000 residents lived here; as of the 2010 census there were 2,842 inhabitants, according to figures tracked by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. The number of households has decreased from 5,363 to 1,624. Homeownership was higher than the city average before the storm, but the houses were often passed from generation to generation with no legal documentation, which has presented a nightmarish stumbling block to rebuilding. Futuristic houses resembling sci-fi toasters, built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation, are juxtaposed with homes exposing their skeletal innards and empty slabs.

“You’ve probably never seen stuff growing on top of the roof,” Faulk said as he drove past a house with a tree poking through an attic.

Once there were six schools in the Lower Ninth Ward. Now there is only the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School, which has 800 students in prekindergarten through 12th grade. In the faculty lounge, school officials ticked off a list of services absent from the area: no drugstore, no medical clinic, no barbershop, no grocery store, no fast-food restaurant. The palm trees planted along Claiborne Avenue bring suspicion of temporary Super Bowl sprucing up, not long-term rehabilitation.

“We’re the last community to come back,” Doris Hicks, the chief executive and principal of King Charter, said Monday. She posed the question of why and answered it herself. “All you have to do is stop and think: the residents are black.” She added: “Who cares about our situation? I’m not sure the city cares.”

Tracie Washington, the school’s general counsel, called the Lower Ninth Ward “the sympathy and money bait” used to entice recovery spending in New Orleans. While no area of the city was more devastated than this one, Washington said: “The money’s not here. That should be a cautionary tale for the recovery from Sandy.”

It is hoped that ground will be broken on a separate King High School in March, Hicks said. Meanwhile, the basketball team practices outdoors this winter because the current school has no gym. James Mack, the athletic director and basketball coach, serves as a kind of human thermometer. If he has to put his hands in his pockets, it is too cold to work out.

“You can’t practice basketball if you can’t catch it,” Mack said.

After more than two hours touring his boyhood neighborhoods, Faulk returned on Tuesday to his hotel in downtown New Orleans. On Sunday, he will attend the championship game at the Superdome, where he once hawked popcorn. His producers at the NFL Network asked whether he had any photographs from those days, but they were lost during Katrina in his mother’s flooded home.

Such reminiscing brought “a mixed bag of emotions,” Faulk said. “You feel discouraged with some things, then you feel encouraged by some things. I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of guy. I see that the city is vibrant, bouncing back. A great light is being shined on the city with the Super Bowl being here. I think it’s just a matter of time when those things are going to reach places like the Lower Ninth Ward. I don’t want to say that’s the only area that’s affected. On the outskirts of the city, a lot of areas need improvement. I know there’s people living in those areas who feel like it ain’t happening soon enough. I think, just give it more time. We continue to have Super Bowls here, get the Final Four back, things like we saw today, you’ll start to see more improvement.”

Earlier, sitting in the modest bleachers at Carver’s practice field, Faulk tempered the grim surroundings with his favorite high school story. He was a freshman in 1987 and his brother, Joe, was a senior. As older brothers do, Joe ignored Marshall, would not let him even sit at the same table for lunch. Then, during the homecoming game, Faulk entered as a split end. He made a long catch and run down the sideline. His brother, who was not a player, became animated and trailed along the boundary in elation.

“I can see my brother acknowledging I was his brother for the first time,” Faulk said, laughing. “I got so excited, I got caught at the 1.”